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misxif
Participating Frequently
Juni 20, 2026 2:56 PM UTC
Investigating

P: Lightroom Classic v15.3, & later on Mac OS Tahoe: importing a photo file which includes a | (pipe) symbol in dc_subject metadata causes Lightroom to hang with 100% CPU usage.

Lightroom Classiv v15.3 (on Mac OS Tahoe) has a problem importing photo files that have a pipe symbol - a | symbol - in the XMP field dc:subject.

Lightroom apparently has a problem interpreting the pipe symbol, and then hangs, seemingly indefinitely until the import is cancelled, while showing a high level of CPU usage. This hanging seems to take place at the end of the import process for this photo.

The pipe symbol is used by Lightroom to separate levels in the keyword hierarchy within the Hierarchical Subject XMP field.  Having pipe symbols also within the keywords doesn’t seem to be a problem with the Hierarchical Subject field - at least it doesn’t interfere with importing.  Also the pipe symbols in the Weighted Flat Subject field don’t seem to cause a problem with imports.

Attached is a sample file that hangs when being imported into Lightroom.  Of course, a problem file causes a batch import of photos to fail, with some number of files correctly importing until Lightroom does to process a problem file.

I have tested with various other programs that import photos with their metadata, and they do not have the same problem as Lightroom.

As a historical note, the saving of the pipe symbols in the dc:subject field was done by an earlier version of Lightroom, perhaps related to addition of keyboard hierarchies that contained empty keywords.

    9 Antworten

    misxif
    misxifAutor
    Participating Frequently
    Juni 28, 2026 7:56 AM UTC

    I confirm that, of course, this import parsing bug also applies in the case of importing .dng files with embedded metadata.

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    misxif
    misxifAutor
    Participating Frequently
    Juni 27, 2026 3:02 PM UTC

    I confirm that this bug also applies to .xmp sidecars to raw files (the .xmp files generated originally by Lightroom 13).  My previous tests were only with .jpg files, with embedded xmp.

     

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    johnrellis
    Legend
    Juni 24, 2026 9:48 PM UTC

    Moderators, ​@Rikk Flohr_Photography, please move to bugs.  See my previous post for a simple bug recipe.

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    johnrellis
    Legend
    Juni 24, 2026 9:47 PM UTC

    To reproduce on LR 15.4.1 / Mac OS 26.4.1:

     

    1. Download and unzip the attached image “bad.jpg”. 

     

    2. Import it into LR with the Add option. Observe that the import never completes, with the progress bar showing:

     

    “exiftool -a -G” shows the metadata contents of “bad.jpg”:

    $ exiftool -a -G bad.jpg
    [ExifTool] ExifTool Version Number : 13.57
    [File] File Name : bad.jpg
    [File] Directory : .
    [File] File Size : 3.8 kB
    [File] File Modification Date/Time : 2026:06:24 14:34:56-07:00
    [File] File Access Date/Time : 2026:06:24 14:34:58-07:00
    [File] File Inode Change Date/Time : 2026:06:24 14:34:57-07:00
    [File] File Permissions : -rw-r--r--
    [File] File Type : JPEG
    [File] File Type Extension : jpg
    [File] MIME Type : image/jpeg
    [File] Exif Byte Order : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
    [File] Image Width : 64
    [File] Image Height : 67
    [File] Encoding Process : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
    [File] Bits Per Sample : 8
    [File] Color Components : 3
    [File] Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
    [EXIF] Orientation : Horizontal (normal)
    [EXIF] X Resolution : 144
    [EXIF] Y Resolution : 144
    [EXIF] Resolution Unit : inches
    [EXIF] Y Cb Cr Positioning : Centered
    [EXIF] Exif Version : 0221
    [EXIF] Components Configuration : Y, Cb, Cr, -
    [EXIF] User Comment : Screenshot
    [EXIF] Flashpix Version : 0100
    [EXIF] Color Space : sRGB
    [EXIF] Exif Image Width : 5120
    [EXIF] Exif Image Height : 2880
    [EXIF] Scene Capture Type : Standard
    [XMP] XMP Toolkit : Image::ExifTool 13.57
    [XMP] Subject : |
    [Composite] Image Size : 64x67
    [Composite] Megapixels : 0.004

     

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    misxif
    misxifAutor
    Participating Frequently
    Juni 25, 2026 7:15 AM UTC

    Thanks John for outlining a simple bug test and for forwarding it on to the moderators.

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    Sameer K
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    Juni 30, 2026 9:38 AM UTC

    +1 to this. Thanks for the tag. I’ve shared this with the team for review with the sample image.

     

    Best,
    Sameer K

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    johnrellis
    Legend
    Juni 23, 2026 2:39 AM UTC

    Unfortunately, the format converts attached JPEGs to Webp format and discards the metadata. If you can convert the file to DNG format and the problem still occurs, then attach the DNG. Otherwise, upload it to Wetransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive or similar free service and post the sharing link here.

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    misxif
    misxifAutor
    Participating Frequently
    Juni 23, 2026 1:51 PM UTC

    Hello John, thanks for the tip.

    Here is a link to the photo: https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZB0ncZD8RkUBj5f4mcfEVg6qFlwYGPNx9y


    FYI, I have confirmed that Lightroom importing does not have a problem with other somewhat strange characters in the keywords of my photos, only with the pipe symbol (as far as I have seen).  The photo I am posting imports without problems when the keywords containing pipe symbols are removed.  This was also true with around 30 other photos within a large batch of photos being imported.

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